The Associated Press retracted a story Sunday after wildly misreporting a quote by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY).

According to TheBlaze, the retraction notice states:

The Associated Press has withdrawn its story about Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., saying he sees some in the his party favoring a 2016 presidential candidate with an immigration policy that would “round up people … and send them back to Mexico.”  That quote was in the transcript of “Fox News Sunday” that was distributed after Paul’s interview on the show.  A subsequent Associated Press review of an audio recording of the show determined that the transcript had dropped the word “don’t” from that quote, and Paul actually said, “They don’t want somebody who wants to round people up, put them in camps and send them back to Mexico.”   [All emphasis added]

Newsbusters’ Noel Sheppard noted that while the FoxNews transcript did inaccurately record Paul’s comments, “shouldn’t it be someone’s responsibility at the nation’s leading wire service to crosscheck the accuracy of such transcripts especially given the disclaimer at the top of the page [that it is a rush transcription]?”

Many news agencies, including TheBlaze, utilize the Associated Press as a wire service to provide extra content for readers.  Such stories are often automatically published, so the story was likely seen by countless viewers across left and right-leaning websites.

Watch Sen. Paul's actual statements here:

This morning on radio, Glenn reacted to the AP's inaccurate story and added it to a long list of media misses in recent history this morning on radio.

"The Associated Press put this poison out into the system and now there are people that will believe forever that Rand Paul said that," he said.

Having experience with this sort of thing himself, Glenn knows very well that no matter how many times inaccuracies are corrected in a story, once it's out there…it's out there. That's why the left has been able to build a false narrative around who he is and what he really believes. Even now, there are stories being written by Libertarians who wish Glenn would stop saying that he's Libertarian because they believe the things other people have read about him — not what he actually stands for.

Glenn also emphasized that while the AP may have spread this story, it did not come from them. The story was pulled from a bad transcript released by a cable news show that the Senator appeared on Sunday morning. He also noted that it's easy for rush transcripts to be inaccurate — it's unlikely that this originated as an intentional smear against Rand Paul. However, that's no excuse for the AP. He noted that the AP should know if something is accurate before publishing it — it's their job. Rand Paul's ideology is no secret — he's a Libertarian. Anyone who knows anything about Libertarians should have recognized that this comment seemed out of place and inconsistent.

"If you're the Associated Press, you certainly have the e‑mail address of an aide to Rand Paul that you can say, "Hey, this statement is completely inconsistent with everything else he's ever said on the topic," Stu pointed out.

But that's the other problem. As Glenn points out, because the media has built such a false narrative around the Tea Party, that's all the AP sees in Rand Paul. The don't even pay attention to his actual Libertarian ideology. They just see "Tea Party" and make false assumptions based on a false narrative.

"There's no journalism in America anymore," Glenn said. "They just write it.  They see somebody else report it and they are like, "Well, it was reported by him."  And so what happens?  It's wrong story after story after story because they rely on themselves."